Shawn Wallace is director of AS220 Labs. He will discuss Labs at tonight’s Providence Geeks dinner which will be held from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. at AS220, 115 Empire St. in Providence.

PBN: For the uninitiated, what exactly is AS220 Labs? How long has it been around?

WALLACE: Labs has been around for a little bit over a year. We are a shared studio space and what I describe as a “community junk pile” for supporting open hardware and software projects. We teach workshops, and we’re sort of a local instance of this global network of hacker spaces. We’re a little bit different from most of them because we’re sort of a hacker space embedded in an existing artistic community. … We have about 600 square feet here, but we also have all the rest of AS220 – we can spread out into performance space.

PBN: What is a hacker space exactly? I know it’s not at all people trying to take down the Pentagon computer network.

WALLACE: A hacker space is essentially a bunch of people pooling their resources. Hacker spaces take different forms, but they’re all about making things – that’s sort of our unofficial mission, to help people make things. Some of the hacker spaces are more hardware-oriented or more software-oriented. Some of them own their own spaces, some of them rent their own space, some of them exist not as physical spaces but are more nomadic – there’s a global listing at HackerSpaces.org, sort of a loose affiliation. It is becoming a more organized phenomenon; they have weekly conference call meet-ups. But usually these are pretty small spaces.

PBN: What are you going to be talking about at Geeks tonight?

WALLACE: I’m doing kind of a pecha kucha-style presentation, except I’m doing 60 slides in 20 minutes. It’s going to be sort of an introduction to AS220 Labs, history, how to access the space, some of the equipment that we have and some of the fab tools that we’re using, some of the workshops that we run, and also I sat out on a panel at the Maker Faire, and I’m going to share a little bit about some of the entrepreneurial business models that we talked about on the panel.

PBN: Speaking of Maker Faire, I saw you got the Editor’s Choice Blue Ribbon there for Drawbot. What’s Drawbot?

WALLACE: The Drawboat was a project that I did about a year ago, [when] we had a big empty wall. There are a number of other Drawbots, but this particular one was based on an artist who did insulation in here named Tristan Perich, and he had a Drawbot in our stairwell a few years ago. And here we had a big empty wall in the lab that I wanted to fill up, so I built my own Drawbot inspired by his. We’ve been tweaking it over the last year.

It is a microcontroller that runs two motors, and there’s a Sharpie attached to the motors, and it moves the Sharpie on a wall, and it can draw circles and Bézier curves, and can move from one point to another point. You have to write a program so they can draw something.

PBN: Where do things stand with development of the new Fab Lab that you’re partnering with MIT on?

WALLACE: We first made contact with the MIT Media Lab folk last summer, and then in November we had sort of a fundraiser press conference announcing our collaboration with the Media Lab at the Center for Bits and Atoms [at MIT]. We raised about half the money we needed at that event in November – this whole suite of equipment is on the order of about $50,000; that’s just for the equipment, not the other overhead stuff.

So we started buying equipment in January, and training people, we started offering classes. We have almost everything in your standard Fab Lab, there’s just one big piece of equipment that’s going to have to wait until we have a larger space. Until then, we’ve started laser-cutting classes. Public access has kind of just opened up, so in order to use the laser-cutter you’ve got to take the laser-cutter class and do the orientation, and then you can put an account into our scheduling software and you can sign up for time in the lab. We have about the first 20 people who took the class have just kind of started using that last month. It’s becoming more used.

On the Mercantile Building [redevelopment], the contractor has started work, all the funding is in place, all the financing, and [we expect it to be finished] in about a year and a half. I don’t know if that’s ribbon-cutting or what, so don’t hold me to that. •